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Happy New Year, everyone! It sure would have been nice if I’d gotten around to telling you all about our wonderful Christmastime, so I’ll try to remember to do that over the next few days, but for now, I’ll tell you about my very nice New Year’s Eve and Day.

First of all, yesterday Dan and Henry cleaned the whole hideously messy back room which serves as hobby-room/office/Kara-closet. I’ve been wishing that room was clean for, oh, years, so that was a wonderful thing!

And then last night my mom and Bob and Chloe came over, and Dan and Henry were here too so it was a very jolly New year’s Eve. We talked and laughed and ate a nice dinner of my carrot-potato-cheese soup and garlic toast, and a beautiful salad that Mom made using lettuce and the few remaining tomatoes from her garden, YUM. Sal gave piano lessons to Henry and Chloe while I was cooking dinner. Mom went home after dinner (8pm is pretty late for her already) and, until midnight, the rest of us just talked and laughed and listened to a collection of Beatles tracks that someone somewhere ripped from the Beatles Rock Band disks, so we could hear JUST vocals, or JUST bass, etc. That was really quite thrilling.

I got to bed around 12:30, listened to The Archers, fell asleep immediately after that, and slept until 9am, so that must have been close to 8 hours of sleep. A good way to start 2011. After I woke up and read email, checked twitter, etc., I did my first LibriVox recording of the year, Charles Perrault’s version of Puss in Boots for the Charles Perrault Fairy Tale collection. When I saw that project go up I begged for Puss in Boots. I just love that tale. Why does he need the boots? Who cares. He just does.

Then I had a lovely chat with Aravis until it was time to wake Henry up. I fixed him a little cup of coffee for a treat (decaf!) and we had a great time listening to The Rite of Spring and following along in the Dover edition of the full orchestral score that Santa brought him. Henry’s dad picked him up around 1:30, and a minute or two later Mom showed up to help me get my garden ready for Spring! She brought me six lovely sacks of composted steer manure (from Home Depot, she doesn’t have any livestock, heh), and she dug those into my little garden bed, and pulled weeds and everything, while I tried to stay warm in the sunshine and we talked and talked. And then we planted peas, lettuce, spring onions, and cilantro.

In the early evening Dan and I went to see “The King’s Speech” which was really superb! I loved every minute of it, as did Dan I think, and the minute we got home I made plans with Mom and Chloe to take them to see it tomorrow. It’s got a quiet but extraordinarily moving story, a great cast (Mister Darcy, Lucy Honeychurch, Lizzie Bennett, Squire Hamley, Mister Collins, and many other familiar faces), and a lovely score with lots of Mozart and an excellent use of Beethoven’s 7th at a critical moment in the story. Read some reviews to see if it looks like your kind of thing, and if it does, please go see it before it leaves the theater. Let’s support those rare movie makers who know how to tell a decent story.

Then this evening I knitted and watched several episodes of a BBC Music History series by Howard Goodall, which was great, and then we watched a few episodes of Venture Brothers and now it is bedtime.

7 Responses to “Happy New Year!”

Thank you so much for reading my favorite books, A Little Princess and The Secret Garden. You are an amazing reader and I am glad that I found your recordings. I am an avid reader myself, but I hate the way I sound when I read aloud. You are a great alternative to reference when I think about the candace and nuances of a person’s speech. Thank you so much! :-)

Hi,
Well, I have insomnia tonight, and when I can’t sleep, I listen to audio books. Right now, I’m listening to your reading of Sense and Sensibility. I’m a huge Jane Austen fan; in fact, if she were alive today and condescended to do book signings at Barnes and Nobles, I would probably camp out all night just to get her signature. My favorite is Persuasion, because neither of the protagonists are perfect or in the first bloom of youth, and the story is, to me, more like reality – with a second chance.
Listening to Sense and Sensibility is how I came to find your blog, and thought I’d say “hello.”

Sounds like a great New Year celebration, Kara! I’m a wee bit jealous that you can harness Sal’s energy for your garden! I need some of that over here! The one time she visited, she raked leaves or something for hours! It was great!

Hello Kara, so nice to meet you! I initially tr
ied to contact you because I’m experiencing challenges with the LV forum–I have two private messages in my outbox that need sending, Hello Kara, they’re sitting in my outbox and I’m not sure how to send them. But then I noted your hobbies: Like you, I am an avid knitter and we are the same age. What types of things do you knit? I’m currently knitting something called a cowell–my first one, I usually stick to afghans and scarves!

The PMs in your outbox have been sent but not yet read by the recipients. One they have been read they go into the “sent” box. Or something like that! Anyway, there’s nothing you have to do at this point.